Professor leads team to research Muslim identity in the U.S.

A journey into America

BARBARA KARKABI, COPYRIGHT 2009 HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 6:30 am, Friday, February 27, 2009

Photo: Eric Kayne, Chronicle

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Akbar Ahmed, a prominent Islamic scholar and professor at American University, and four students traveled through the Muslim world and wrote a book, Journey from Islam: The Crisis of Globalization. He is now in the U.S., interviewing Muslim Americans. less

Akbar Ahmed, a prominent Islamic scholar and professor at American University, and four students traveled through the Muslim world and wrote a book, Journey from Islam: The Crisis of Globalization. He is now in ... more

Photo: Eric Kayne, Chronicle

Professor leads team to research Muslim identity in the U.S.

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At 65, Akbar Ahmed could be sitting comfortably, looking back on his long career as a diplomat, author and professor of Islamic studies.

Instead, Ahmed is on the road with a team of twenty-somethings, leading what he calls a “journey into America.”

Their goal, he said during a visit to Houston last weekend, is to research Muslim identity in the United States, as well as the attitude of non-Muslim Americans toward their Muslim neighbors.

“This is a very ambitious project, because I’m not only looking at the Muslim community, I’m looking at the way we have to live in the 21st century,” said Ahmed, a Muslim who grew up in Pakistan. “Are we going to live in a world where we are able to think of the global problems that are mutual, like global warming, poverty, violence between religions and the population explosion? Or are we going to be living in a world where we look at our neighbors with suspicion and point fingers at each other? We are all suffering from this.”

Ahmed and his team, including several former students from American University in Washington, D.C., have visited more than 60 cities and handed out hundreds of questionnaires. They’ve been to mosques, synagogues and churches; they’ve spent time with a black Muslim rapper in Buffalo, Latino Muslims in Miami and the Dawoodi Bohra Indian Muslim community in Houston. While here, he also spoke to students at the University of St. Thomas.

Ahmed and his team plan to produce a book and a documentary on their six-month project. In many ways it’s a companion to his 2007 book,Journey Into Islam(Brookings Institution Press, $19.95). Two team members, Dallas native Hailey Woldt and Frankie Martin, also worked on the first project, which documented their two-month journey to eight Islamic countries.

During that trip, people were asked what they thought was the greatest threat to the Muslim world.

“Most said that American misconception of Islam was the greatest threat,” Woldt said. “They didn’t say Iraq or Afghanistan, it was American misunderstanding. So, we thought, let’s see if that’s really true.”

Woldt says her own experience was life-changing from the moment she first landed in the Middle East. Her experience, she said, opened her eyes to the need for more understanding.

“I felt physically scared, even though I had read and tried to learn as much as I could about Islam,” she said. “I went with as much open-mindedness as possible, but I still associated Islam with 9/11. I realized how deep that misunderstanding was and how long it would take, over the two months of traveling, to change my ideas and reactions.”

Ahmed is approaching the project as an anthropologist.

“I’m going to say: ‘I went with my team, we went to the field. This is what was said, this is what we saw, this is what we recorded,’ ” he said.

The questions being asked of Americans are similar to those asked in Muslim countries, Ahmed told a predominantly Muslim gathering at novelist Bapsi Sidhwa’s Houston home.

Most guests seemed happy to fill out the questionnaire. But one asked, “What’s the point of doing this? If there is another terrorist incident, we will all be back to square one.”

It’s a question Ahmed has heard before. It’s understandable, but he worries that it represents a “defeatist attitude.”

“If the (Muslim) community begins to think like that — then there is no hope,” he said.

Ahmed learned as a young boy that he lived in a world that was “very unsettled, unfair and unpredictable.” During the 1947 partition of India, when he was only 4, his family traveled by train from Delhi to Karachi, in the newly created country of Pakistan. It was a violent time when both Hindus and Muslims were attacked as they fled by train to their new homes.

“My earliest memory was of being in a tiny compartment with yellowish lights, a lot of tension and my father constantly saying: ‘Don’t speak, don’t even move, don’t breathe.’ ”

As a result, he felt the need to help create some order and peace to the world. He joined Pakistan’s civil service in 1966 and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge University, before being appointed as the chair of Islamic Studies at American University in 2001. Since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Ahmed has been involved in numerous interfaith dialogues, including a series of public talks with Judah Pearl, the father of slain American journalist Danny Pearl.

On his journey through America, Ahmed encounters two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, Muslims here repeatedly have told him they are happy to live in a country where they are free to practice their faith.

“When he visited our mosque, he asked one of the boys what it meant to be an American, and he replied: ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ ” said Abeezar Tyebji, director of the Dawoodi Bohra Community of Houston.

Many American Muslims still worry about “Islamophobia” and feel the need for more interfaith dialogues, Ahmed said.

But the book, he believes, is as much about Americans understanding American society as it is about Muslims understanding Muslims. And then bringing the two together.

In the last chapter, Ahmed plans to include concrete steps for improving relations.

“I think he will leave behind a very good legacy,” Tyebji said, calling Ahmed’s study groundbreaking. “But I also believe that in the process, he is building a lot of bridges. This is the first time I met him, but that is how I felt.”